The article reveals issues of forming and using funds that are legally provided to the Russian public universities, which operate in the educational services market. Russian public universities deliver state educational services like other participants of the market: private universities and educational entities, which have legal procedural type of the public establishment. Meanwhile the state and general public expect that Russian leading universities make groundbreaking progress and join the list of the world’s best universities. The public universities’ legal status (found as a state-financed or autonomous entity) has some special characteristics based on norms of civil laws, which define the property status of the state-financed or autonomous entity, as well as on norms of budget laws. These characteristics are the following: receiving subsidies to fulfill the government tasks. In this way the subsidies are used only for state-financed or autonomous entities. The universities’ dependence on subsidies aimed at fulfilling the government tasks is compensated by their right to have income-generating activities. Profits from these types of activities are disposed by the state-financed or autonomous entities themselves. However this right is limited by several restrictions and mandatory requirements. The most important limitation for the budgetary entities is the responsibility to use bankbooks opened by the Federal Treasury authorities. The mandatory use of several bankbooks with different types of disposing rights and rights of controlling procedures (including the approval procedures) limits the self-sufficiency to make effective decisions on how to dispose the funds. Due to the lack of regulations and incoordination of the budgetary norms, which define the goal of using the funds, it is sometimes unclear if it is legal for the Universities to use the funds or how to specify the financial basis of civil-legal liability of the state-financed entities, which are participants of the education services market.